As we blithely email, Facebook, Tweet, Instagram, and Pin’terest our way into our “LinkedIn” 21st century, publishing personal stories of meaning and power built on our digital demographic data, the Lords of the Cloud are busy surveilling, sorting, sifting, aggregating, and sharing our personal information with the world’s most powerful corporations and government entities, often without our informed consent (#readthefineprint).

A decade ago, we media educators were working in the midst of a media-saturated world of 3000 commercial messages daily, a world in which 90% of our media content was ultimately owned by 6 transnational media corporations with “nothing to tell but everything to sell,” as George Gerbner liked to say. Instead of promoting health, wealth and wisdom, mainstream media stories were designed to put profit and the interests of commercial corporations above all else, promoting disease, debt, and distraction.

Times have changed.

Today, the stakes are even higher. Our media stories are now “shared” through an ever-growing network of social media channels, proprietary digital networks built, owned and managed by the world’s most powerful for-profit new digital media corporations – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple – designed to aggregate our personal data and condition us to be better buyers.

How do we challenge the Lords of the Cloud and Big Media interests who care more about building brand loyalty and separating us from our cash then they do about our our children, our classrooms, our communities and our commons?

It begins with the kind of media education ACME has been organizing and practicing since 2002.